Snowboy, according to Smith, isn’t “terribly involved with the scenes, but I do have some lines.”

He approached that as an acting challenge.

“Getting a script and getting a character that may not have a whole lot to say, you have to figure out what his purpose is,” Smith said.

“I’m kind of the lookout,” he decided. “I’m always by the door, always looking around to see what’s going on.

“The Jets have a ranking system,” he continued. “I’m right in the middle. I’m not a high-ranking Jet, but I’m not a little sprout either. I’ve got some clout.”

The actor, too, is getting some clout on his first national tour.

He auditioned in late 2011 for the role of Riff, the Jets’ leader, but prior commitments to dance in productions of “The Nutcracker” in Pampa, Lubbock and Abilene prevented him from making his callback audition.

After returning to New York, he got the chance to audition again, this time to play Snowboy and to cover for Riff and Tony, the central male character, when the actors who play them can’t perform.

Both roles, particularly Tony, play more to what Smith sees as his strengths.

“As much as I took dancing seriously (at Tech), I graduated with a voice degree with a minor in acting,” Smith said. “I knew then and now that my strength is in my singing ... (but) this show is making me feel more like a dancer, I guess.”

“West Side Story” has a way of doing that.

At the time of its Broadway debut in 1957, it featured more dancing than any other musical to that point.

Developed as a modern-day take on “Romeo and Juliet,” the musical boasted a stellar creative team: book by Arthur Laurents, music by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and directed and choreographed by Jerome Robbins.

Instead of the Montagues and the Capulets, the musical focuses on the Jets, made up of Polish-American kids, and the Sharks, Puerto Rican immigrants. Tony, a former Jet, and Maria, the sister of a Shark, fall in love in the middle of all the rumbles.

As befitting its tragic roots, the musical gets fairly dark.

“This is very, very different from the (1961) movie,” Smith said. “But honestly, I really feel like we have a better story to tell than the movie did. It’s more real, less of a joke. ... It comes from a real place.

“I mean, there are some funny moments, but overall, we’re definitely focused on the sadness,” he said. “The curtain goes down on two dead bodies at the end of Act One; you can’t make a joke about everything.”

This version hews closely to the latest Broadway revival, which added bilingual dialogue and lyrics for the Sharks and cut dated dialogue.

“The plan was to remove much of the coy musical comedy theatre jargon of the ’50s. This would help to take the gangs more seriously as troubled youths who were a product of this world of bigotry and violence which Arthur (Laurents) had set out to create — ones capable of horrific acts in the tragedy of the story,” said director David Saint, who was Laurents’ associate director for the 2009 revival.

The tour is providing Smith his first real exposure to the musical, outside of singing a few songs in concert in college.

But his experience in musicals doesn’t date back much further than college itself.

“I grew up mainly being a football player,” Smith said. “That’s what boys do (in West Texas).”

But he took on one role in high school, which prompted his theater teacher to suggest that he audition for shows at Tech.

From there, he started working with Lubbock Moonlight Musicals and Ballet Lubbock, which is how he scored his recurring “Nutcracker” gig in Pampa.

Eventually, he changed majors from chemistry to voice.

“When I finally got to do it on stage, it’s a little bug that comes and bites you,” Smith said. “It’s a selfish feeling that you have this drug that wants you to be on stage.

“Who’s to say when I’m 30, I can’t go back to physical therapy school,” he continued. “My idea was, hey, I’m young, I have some potential in this. If I harvest it, maybe I can do something.